Race To The Bottom #1: The Worst Of Kongregate

I’ve been inspired by Jeff’s reviews of the newest Mochi games to start looking around other “UGC” (“User Generated Content” in the biz lingo) sites to try find games that so terrible they can’t be missed. The first stop, Kongregate.com.

Now, let me get this out of the way first. Kongregate.com is GREAT web site, and there are many great games on Kongregate that garner lots of well deserved attention. These are not those games.

The Ground Rules

Suckage: the game must truly, deeply, and passionately suck to be considered for this list. We all know that there are good games that don’t get a fair shake on Kongregate. these are not those games.

Playage: The games must have at least 1000 plays to be considered for this list. that might be too few. We’ll adjust if necessary.

Ratage: The games must have at least 100 ratings to be considered for this list.

Agage: A game must be at least one month old to be considered for this list.

That Special Something: Even if all the above are true, the games still needs a special little extra something to make it on the list. I’m not sure what the “something” is, but I know it when I see it.

The perfect place to start. Toilet Game is very special indeed. It’s been played over 4000 times, which is more than most games on this list, and it’s rating is a hefty 1.82 (out of 5.00) The best part of this game is the title screen animation, which is literally, an animated “number 2” flying towards the screen. Very. Clever. This game is a pure piece of “Interactive fiction”, and for that, it is truly inspired. However the parser is quite small (only two words), and the number of “rooms” is economically set to “one”. This makes the experience ultimately unsatisfying. On second thought, it just makes it total piece of crap…which I believe is what the author intended, so, the “bravo” TVgames, you succeeded!

Yes, another TVgames game, but it is here to make a point. It’s quite obvious that TVgames might be trying very very hard to make terrible games on purpose. I know, It’s irony right? Well, if so, then take this review as “ironic” too, and we’ll call it even. The title screen on this one is again very “special”, but this time because it is kind of cool. Roll-over the items on the title screen to see what I mean. Kinda neat eh? OK, onto the game. There is a car, and it does move. The car actually turns (however, not from the center), and a GIANT MovieClip scrolls below it. that’s it. To be honest, this one shows promise, as it probably took about twice the time to program as Toilet Game. I mean, he had to fuse TWO set of stolen tutorial code into ONE game, and we all know how tricky that can be. However, I’m not sure what TVGames did with the other 2 minutes he had during the According To Jim commercial break in which he created this game. My advice: next time, use the whole 3 minutes my man, and you might really have something. The game has been played 1195 times with an average rating of 2.01.

Best Comment: this is the best game this guy ever made. Seriously though I wasn’t expecting to actually control the car -stopzerwraffing

WAIT!!!!

You know what, this is too easy. It’s like fishing with power-saws. It’s like lighting a campfire with a gallon of gasoline. It’s like making Joe Biden jokes. At some point, it just gets too easy, and for what cause? Everyone knows these games suck, even the guy who made them. I’m going to have to go back to the drawing board and try to think of something else.

Next time, look for reviews of some new Flash Game Distribution games.